So a quick trick I used before I knew this, is just to see what Scott’s histogram is doing, and get as close as you can. I redid everything using RAW images instead of JPEG and it didn’t make that much difference.

Importing his pictures into I-Photo and then sending them out into PS seemed to change them from RAW to JPEG, so I am now using them directly out of the downloaded file and they show up in Camera Raw as Raw images… although I noticed that image #3 was a jpeg file… done that way for the lesson. There’s probably an easy answer to that too, but for now I am happy it only took me three hours to figure it out.

Is this the place to get answers?

Dale

just wanted to alert you of my situation as of now;

I’m sitting in my hotel room after a 10-day holiday in NYC where I have taken about 600 photographs of various sights and “tourist-y” buildings, attractioncs etc., but as I look at them, I realize that I have little or no clue on what to do to process them into a beautiful photograph – like yours.

So I resort to the one place where I know I can find help, tips and guidance – the internet. Half an hour into googling, I realized that the answer was in front of me all along (in my bookmarks), so I pull up your site and scroll older entries until I came across this post and it hit me; this is exactly what I need.

Sadly, my excitement plummeted when I realized that I would not have the time to make a book-run into the city before my eight hour flight to Norway leaves tomorrow, a trip I was hoping could be spent reading your book and trying to process my photographs into something “more”.

Google (Maps) to the rescue, again; find bookstores near Newark International Airport, Border’s Books inside the airport, check store site for book search, find “Kelby” – I swear, it was like the light in my room dimmed when the results returned. They had it! So tomorrow morning I’ll be heading into Terminal C, Gate 102 at EWR and hopefully they’ll have the book in stock and my flight back home will be so much more educational and fun than just watching old episodes and movies on the 7″ headrest monitor.

Sorry for the rant, hopefully you (or your comment system) won’t mind. And hopefully I’ll learn a thing – or 7! – from your book! If I’m really lucky, they’ll have wireless internet at the airport and I’ll be able to download the photographs used in the book. Cross your fingers for all of the above.

The reason I’m writing this is simply because I’m so excited about it and I thought this perhaps could be a nice story for Scott Kelby to have and hopefully he’ll have a good feeling this weekend because of it. Praise and appreciation is always good, no?

The thumbnail in the layers palette is showing me the smart object curled page icon but the background to this is plain white. If I try and edit the smart object I get the following error:

‘Could not edit original smart object because the disk is not available’

I’m running everything on a local machine so can’t really make much sense of the error.

Any advice greatfully received

Why can’t you simply load a virtual copy of the image you have used for the lightroom portion of the points into PSCS3, then convert it to a smart object after it has been loaded. Then save it back to LR when finished. Then make another virtual copy if needed back in PS3?

Lately, I have been re-working my old black and white negatives and was wondering if you have any suggestions/tips/workflow for enhancing these in photoshop, camera raw, lightroom, etc?

Thanks
Roger

CS2 for Digital Photographers improved my photos tremendously. Looking abck at my old photos it is like a dirty film clung to them…that is now gone. The best trick for me was your section ‘Color correcting Digital Camera Images’ in Ch 6. It erased the dirty film and revealed much better color.

One question, though. In that chapter you give target color numbers for RGB output and for CMYK output. I am a print designer so, of course, use the latter. I recently produced two books back to back. On the first one I used the RGB targets by accident and thought I was doomed when I discovered what I had done a few days before it went to press. I changed the presets to the CMYK targets for the next book. In looking at the two later side by side, I felt the better targets actually turned out to be the RGB ones–or maybe my adding a sharper contrast curve to them helped a lot. In any case, the colors were more saturated, the blacks much richer. The photos had more ‘pop’. And both were printed on the same press one after the other.

I have just bought your ‘7 point’ book and noticed in one of the early lessons-#2 I think–you have different RGB targets–for (inkjet) color printers. I wondered what targets you recommend for CMYK now–and what you use yourself. Your photographs look great in the book. Rich, saturated, clean…what more can you want–at least on the printing side?

Thanks
Kelley

Just a couple more observations as I continue my lessons:

1. At lesson 3, step 5 it was necessary for me to incrrease the Recovery to 93 (rather than the 5 you were able to use) before all clipping was eliminated. (I do calibrate my monitor weekly.)

2. The NEF for lesson 7 opens in Camera Raw with significant adjustments already made. It is easy enough to reset everything to agree with step 1 of the book but just wanted to let you know. (I am using the image from the download of files for just Lessons 1-7.)

Thanks,
Bill

Many thanks also to Scott for addressing this issue and for hosting an interactive blog where we can not only get useful info from the master himself, but also on occasion from those of us who read his daily entries.